The provision of communication services to businesses and individuals often entails the transmission of voice, image and other data via the use of communication devices maintained by different communication carrier service providers. While the provision of such communication services may be adapted to appear "seamless" to users, e.g., via consolidated billing by a single carrier to its customer, the underlying cross-carrier services are in fact billed between the cooperating service providers on a periodic basis.
By way of primary example, multiple telecommunication carriers may be utilized to complete a given long distance call between two remote locations. The call may be initiated by a caller via interface with the caller's local telephony carrier service provider, transferred for interstate transmission to a long distance service provider, and further transferred to a local telephony service provider for the called party. In such an arrangement, while the caller's local telephony carrier service provider will bill the caller for charges associated with the call, the long distance service provider and called party local telephony carrier may bill the caller's local telephony service provider. The amount charged between various communication carrier service providers may be as per regulated rates and/or agreed upon contract rates, and may further depend upon a variety of other considerations (e.g., volume of communications between carriers, time-of-day of communications between carriers, degree of special access between carriers, bandwidth allocated for communications, etc.).
As will be appreciated, given the ever-increasing volume of communications involving multiple carriers the complexity of the services provided, and the increasing number of communications providers, the management of cross-carrier billings can be a formidable task. Concomitantly, the validation, payment, and analysis of such cross billings can be burdensome, particularly in view of highly labor-intensive techniques currently employed to provide such functionality.